Globalvia

Background

A world leader in transport infrastructure management, Globalvia manages 29 projects involving highways, railways, hospitals and ports in eight countries.

In October 2015, 100 per cent of Globalvia’s shares (which were held by FCC and Bankia) were acquired for approximately €420 million by international pension funds OPTrust, PGGM and the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS).

Globalvia’s strategic objective is to generate value for its shareholders by managing its asset portfolio to continue to be a benchmark in the infrastructuremanagement market. Its corporate purpose is infrastructure development and operation. Globalvia’s target markets are OECD countries with special emphasis on Spain and other European Union member-states and North America.

Situation

The process of selling the company took place in three steps over a period of four years.

Uploading and controlling all confidential information relating to the transaction was a potential challenge; Globalvia’s administrators and end-users needed a simple and secure solution for interacting with bidders and advisors. Also, Globalvia needed to generate accurate reports for the transaction steering committee, so its members were able to monitor deal progress efficiently.

For Globalvia, it was important to protect information based on its level of criticality. Once sensitive, high-value information leaves the company, there are significant consequences attached to the risk of its exposure. For this reason, Globalvia decided sharing information through Excel spreadsheets was insufficient from a security and efficiency perspective. Instead, Globalvia required a secure virtual data room (VDR).

Solution

Globalvia used Intralinks several times in the past for its own M&A investment processes, and so it was already familiar with Intralinks’ virtual data room solution. Intralinks was naturally the first choice for this major transaction.

Benefits

It was easy for Intralinks to accommodate the scale of this transaction, with Globalvia having almost 100 users requiring access to the VDR, all of whom spanned different countries and roles.

Documents were controlled and secured using Intralinks’ Information Rights Management (IRM), with watermarking and protection policies applied on both folders and individual documents. This meant the right users had access to the right documents, and administrators were able to revoke access at any point.

Intralinks’ ease of use also meant that, unlike other tools, the VDR itself helped increase the productivity of the deal team. The team was able to set up and populate the VDR with files in under two days, with Intralinks’ customer service team’s activation and set-up process taking just two hours.

With the support of the Intralinks virtual data room, Globalvia was able to close the deal in October 2015 for a purchase price of approximately €420 million.